


Goodnight, Jean

by missazrael



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Zombies, Angst, Blood and Gore, Gore, Happy Halloween?, Horror, Hurt No Comfort, M/M, Psychological Horror, Zombies, but uh, it's gross and sad and horrible, seriously guys this one is unpleasant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-31
Updated: 2015-10-31
Packaged: 2018-04-29 04:12:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,835
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5115356
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/missazrael/pseuds/missazrael
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>There’s always Jean, and it’s that thought alone that gets Marco up, rising in the thin morning light and shuffling to the trapdoor that leads down into his kingdom.</i><br/> <br/>This is the way the world ends<br/>This is the way the world ends<br/>This is the way the world ends<br/>Not with a bang but a whimper.</p>
<p>-TS Eliot</p>
<p>What would keep you going, after everything ended all around you?  What would make you keep getting up in the morning, give you purpose, give you a reason to survive?  Even as everything falls apart all around him, Marco knows the answer to that question: Jean.  He'd keep going for Jean.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Goodnight, Jean

The days have taken on a dreary, routine sameness.

Marco wakes up every morning when the sun comes through the window of his attic room. The electricity failed weeks ago, and now he only has the natural rhythms of light and dark to mark his days from his nights. He thinks it’s spring, that winter has finally given way, but he can’t be sure; going outside is dangerous, and he boarded up all the windows and doors downstairs long ago, before the electricity failed, before the Internet blinked out, before his days took on a mind-numbing routine of similarity. He’s safe here, in his little kingdom, a kingdom that consists of eights rooms (several of which are worthless now, without plumbing and lights and gas and all the other necessities of the modern world that went away), ten books that weren’t burned during the chill of winter, a garage accessible through the kitchen (one of the worthless rooms, used only for storage now), an ever-dwindling supply of food and water that tastes skunkier and more metallic by the day, and Jean.

There’s always Jean, and it’s that thought alone that gets Marco up, rising in the thin morning light and shuffling to the trapdoor that leads down into his kingdom.

There is, Marco thinks as he pads down the stairs, a certain beauty to his life now. There’s no need to change his clothes, as washing them would waste fresh water; there’s no need to wash his face or comb his hair, since Jean doesn’t care what he looks like anymore; there’s no need to remember social graces or manners or even speak, really, although he always does. Some things are easier to let go than others, and Marco hasn’t given up entirely.

Not yet. Not while Jean still needs him.

Marco pauses near a closed door under the attic, a door that once led to his room in his parents’ house, and puts his ear to it, listening. No matter how quiet he is, no matter how slowly he creeps down the stairs, Jean somehow always hears him, and starts moving, rustling in the room that was once Marco’s. Marco hears it, and relief floods through him. Still here. Still waiting for him.

Marco goes downstairs, into the darkness of boarded up windows and still, musty air that carries a scent of rot. It can’t be helped; the room that was once the dining room serves as a dump now, for the cans he and Jean eat from and then refill, and the reek is unavoidable. Marco hardly notices it anymore, and it carries an unexpected benefit: while the boards on the windows keep _them_ out, they don’t keep out the rats, who lick up the scraps and feast on their leavings. If Marco’s careful and patient, he can catch them.

Jean prefers his meat fresh.

Marco moves through the kitchen, scarcely daring to breathe, straining his ears to hear if there’s anything moving about outside. When he boarded up the windows, working frantically, the fence in the backyard had still held, although it was already bulging in spots. Even over the sound of his desperate hammering, he’d been able to hear something scratching on the other side, something eager to get in, eager to climb over the rusting swing set where his siblings had once played, eager to thrust rotting arms through the windows and pull Marco out. Only a few hours after he’d finished, Marco had heard the fence groan and collapse, and he’d shuddered from his attic hideaway, pressing his sweating face against Jean’s back and waiting for them to get inside. 

They hadn’t, and Marco has no desire to pull a board off the window and see what is left of his family’s backyard. Some things are better left unknown.

Today, things are quiet, as they have been for weeks. Perhaps they’ve moved on, left Jinae for more populous areas, for better feeding grounds, for the metropolises of Trost and Sina and the Interior, rich with densely packed humanity. Marco doesn’t know, and he doesn’t care to find out.

He selects a can from his supply, trying to ignore how few cans there are left when once there had been enough to wait out the end of the world, and goes to check his rat traps. One is empty, looking dusty and forlorn in the corner, but he’s been lucky today: another holds a fat, wiggling rat, which glares up at him with beady eyes and squeaks indignantly. They’ve lost their fear of humans, and this one will bite him if he isn’t quick. 

Marco can be quick, and a faint smile tugs at the corner of his mouth as he reaches into the cage. One quick grab and a twist, and the rat hangs from his hand, limp and dead, a thin drool of blood dripping from its mouth. Blood is good. Jean likes blood.

Breakfast in hand, Marco climbs back upstairs, taking care to avoid the step that creaks in the middle, the step that always seemed to echo the loudest when he was sneaking in late, when he didn’t want to wake anyone up. There’s no one left to wake up, and while he doesn’t think they could hear him from all the way outside, he doesn’t care to test the theory. The step is avoided as a matter of course, as a force of habit.

Marco stands in front of Jean’s door and breathes deep, filling his lungs with hot, stale air, then raps on it lightly. “Jean? I’m coming in.”

Jean doesn’t answer—he never does—but Marco hears him rustle, moving on the narrow bed that had once cradled a small, freckled boy, and he lets himself in. “I brought you breakfast.”

Jean tries to roll over on his side when Marco comes in, but the belts wrapped around his upper body, keeping his arms pinned to his sides, and the heavy foam brace around his neck prevent it. He kicks his legs, but those too are held together with leather belts, and the best he can do is a kind of worm motion across the filthy, stained sheet. Marco used to change the sheet everyday, hating to see Jean lay on something so disgusting, but he quickly realized that water was now a finite resource, and he couldn’t waste it on things like laundry. Even still, he changes Jean’s sheet more than he changes his own, used to the sticky feel of his own sweat by now.

“Good morning.” Marco crouches by the side of the bed and helps Jean sit up, taking care to keep his hands away from Jean’s face. Jean can’t move his head very well with the neck brace, but that doesn’t keep him from trying to snap, especially when he smells blood, and Marco can’t risk a bite. He could always gag Jean, but he doesn’t like doing that; Jean will try to chew through the gag, gnawing at the cloth, and it wears away at the corners of his mouth. Marco worries that he could come downstairs someday and find Jean’s face ripped open, a wide, Glasgow smile torn through the thin tissue of his cheeks, and so he leaves Jean ungagged. Marco can be careful with his fingers.

Jean lolls against the wall, his balance almost nonexistent, and Marco hurries to keep him from tipping over, righting him and settling him more securely. 

Jean’s eyes are hazy, cloudy and glazed over, but he can still move them, looking around the room in his slow, disjointed way. They pass over Marco’s face and Marco holds his breath, hoping against hope that today will be the day, that today Jean will recognize him, that he’ll see a spark of the old Jean there. But they pass and settle on the rat in Marco’s hand, and Jean tries to surge forward, making a gargling noise in his throat and nearly falling over again. Marco rights him with a hand on his chest, pushing him back and holding him against the wall. Jean was never very heavy, but now he feels like a bag of bones and regrets.

Marco realizes Jean is drooling.

“Okay, okay, no more waiting.” Marco lifts the rat, holding it carefully by its haunches, and offers it to Jean. Jean cranes his head forward as far as his neck brace will allow, and he looks more alive and intent now, reaching after a freshly dead rat, than he does at any other time. If Marco closes his eyes, he can remember what Jean used to look like, how he used to be so alive, so vibrant, how his eyes used to flash and the cocky, brilliant grins he used to wear, but closing his eyes now would be suicidally foolish. Jean can get a little enthusiastic while he’s eating, and Marco needs to keep his hands away from his lover’s mouth.

Once Jean has a good grip on the rat, though, Marco lets it go and turns away, squeezing his eyes shut. Hearing the crunching sounds is bad enough; having to watch the furry little body disappear would be unbearable.

Soon enough, the sounds of Jean eating fade away, and Marco opens his eyes and looks back at him. Jean is slouching down along the wall, no longer animated now that he’s been fed, and he’s staring off somewhere in the distance, ignoring Marco completely. His chin is covered with blood and tufts of fur, and Marco picks up a grimy rag, darting in quickly to wipe off Jean’s face, knowing that he’ll be docile enough now to touch. Jean tries to turn his head away from the cleaning, but it’s lazy, half-hearted, and Marco gets most of the mess off his face.

“There.” Marco sits back, carelessly dropping the rag on the floor. “Now you look like yourself again.” It’s a lie, Jean looks like a tattered, broken memory of himself, but if Marco thought too hard about that, he’d drive himself mad. Instead, he reaches out and runs his fingers through Jean’s hair, dry and dead and brittle, and takes a moment to arrange it. He’s no good at recreating the artful bedhead that Jean always preferred, but it’s better than letting it lie flat and greasy across Jean’s forehead.

Jean pays him no mind; Marco knows he won’t react to him again until this evening, when Jean starts to get hungry again. Hopefully there will be another rat by then.

~*~

The winter had been long, and cold. Not cold enough to kill _them_ , but Marco had had a time of it, sitting and shivering under piles of blankets, curling up beside Jean in a hopeless attempt to find some warmth. Eventually, he’d had to resort to burning books, to consigning his father’s library to flames, until the ceilings of the house were black with soot and there were only ten books left where there had once been almost a thousand.

Five of the remaining books were photo albums; Marco’s mother had been an avid scrapbooker, and every detail of Marco’s young life, of his sibling’s young lives, had been recorded in exacting detail. Marco can’t look at the books anymore, can’t bear the thought of seeing his younger brother’s doomed face smiling out at him, can’t handle being dragged back to better times, but he can’t burn them either. Burning the albums would be like putting his family on a pyre, and he can’t do it. Even if he can’t open the albums, he won’t destroy them either, because to do so would be to wipe away the last of his mother and her craft.

One of the books is a practical one, one that details all the plants that grow around Jinae and their medicinal uses. Marco hasn’t left the house in months, but he keeps the book out of some misguided thought that maybe, maybe once everything gets better and goes back to normal, it will be useful. 

Another is a copy of _Charlotte’s Web_ , his brother’s favorite book, which had once belonged to Marco and is now battered, torn, and colored in with crayons. It sits beside the photo albums, mute testament to things gone past, unopened but saved. It has a companion, sitting with his father’s first novel, the one that says _For my beloved son, Marco_ on the dedication page. 

The last two books aren’t even Marco’s; they’re the pair of books that Jean had had in his backpack, the ones he’d been reading before it all fell apart. _The Perks of Being a Wallflower_ and _To Kill a Mockingbird_ , beat up paperback copies, books Jean had read again and again, until the pages were tissue thin and fragile. They aren’t kept with the other books, downstairs on library shelves that had once held so many others; Marco keeps them on the nightstand in his childhood room, where Jean can see them while he lays sleepless through the nights, and where Marco can reach them easily during the days, when the hours stretch out into eternity.

“We’re almost done with Scout now,” he tells Jean as he picks up _To Kill a Mockingbird_ , their place marked by the top of an old can. “Then we’ll read about Charlie again, right?”

Jean doesn’t respond; Marco hadn’t been expecting him to. But he doesn’t seem to mind when Marco opens the book and starts reading, his voice low and soft, telling the story of Scout and her brother Jem in what he hopes is a soothing tone. When he’s done with this one, he’ll pick up _The Perks of Being a Wallflower_ and start that one, letting the two stories blend into each other, reading from them in an endless loop. He has parts of the books memorized now, and when he reaches those parts, he recites them, watching Jean’s face the entire time, waiting for that moment of recognition, that signal that Jean understands what’s being read to him. 

The moment never happens, but Marco keeps waiting. 

~*~ 

Their food supply is running dangerously low; with fewer scraps from Marco’s meals, he’s not catching as many rats, which means Jean is going hungry too. He comes downstairs one morning, his own stomach a flat, hot stone pressing between his ribs, to find Jean has found a way to wriggle his neck brace around during the night and gnaw on it, covering the bed with tufts of foam and thick, viscous black drool. 

“Jean!” Marco hurries to the bed, stupidly putting his fingers near Jean’s mouth, pulling the foam out of it, absurdly afraid that Jean might suffocate on it and leave him behind. Jean snaps at his fingers, nearly getting one before Marco pulls away, then makes a low groaning sound. 

Marco’s eyes widen, and he pulls Jean into a sitting position, rougher and faster than usual, making Jean’s head roll loosely and his jaw close with an audible click. Marco pushes his face close to Jean’s, dangerously close, close enough that he can smell the rot coming from Jean’s mouth. “What, Jean? What are you trying to say?” 

Jean eyes keep rolling in his head, set in motion by Marco’s manhandling and the momentum of his body, but they eventually settle, coming to rest and staring directly into Marco’s. Marco waits, his hands loosening on Jean’s shoulders, and when Jean makes the groaning sound again, a rumbling series of syllables that almost sound like an attempt at speech, Marco feels tears prick at the corners of his eyes. 

“Marco, Jean. Say _Marco_. You can do it, I know you can… Mar… co…” 

Jean’s gaze is almost alert, almost focused, and Marco swears he sees something, some spark deep in Jean’s cloudy eyes, some semblance of recognition, a flash of whiskey amber in the murky depths. Then Jean makes a gargling sound, almost a cough, and a tuft of foam falls out of his mouth and lands on his wasted chest. As Marco watches, whatever spark had been there goes out, and Jean slouches in his hands, an empty shell again. 

Marco lowers him to the bed, making sure Jean is comfortable, before sitting on the floor, cradling his head in arms where the muscle has all melted away and have scarcely more meat on them than Jean’s, and starts to cry. Jean lays on the bed behind him, silent witness, staring off into nothingness, black drool drying on his chin. 

~*~ 

The food is gone, the water almost gone, and Marco can’t sleep. Jean is restless, almost as though he senses Marco’s distress, and Marco finally gives up on trying to sleep. He doesn’t stay in the attic room now, no longer trusting himself to be strong enough to climb the stairs to reach it, and lays on the floor instead, outside of Jean’s room, a gaunt, bony sentinel guarding a wasted prince. He sits up, wincing at the aches deep in his joints, and listens. 

Jean must have heard him moving, because the rustling behind the door gets louder. Marco lets himself inside, no longer bothering to knock, and sits on the edge of Jean’s bed, lowering himself down with the care of a much, much older man. 

As soon as Marco settles, Jean stops moving, lying still and looking up at the ceiling, moving his jaw lazily back and forth. He’s gnawed his neck brace further down, giving himself a greater range of motion, and he turns his head back and forth, looking for more foam to bite. Marco realizes that he could pull out Jean’s teeth, that maybe if Jean weren’t able to bite, he’d lose the instinct to do so, but he can’t. Ever so often, Jean curls his upper lip or drops his lower jaw, and there’s a glimmer of his old smile, so bright and beaming and wonderful, and when it happens, it’s like spring bursting forth in Marco’s chest, like the world is slowly setting itself back on course. When Jean almost smiles, it gives Marco the strength to keep going, and he will never, ever be able to pull Jean’s teeth out. Not if it means giving up the hope of ever seeing Jean smile again. 

“Hi, Jean.” Marco’s voice is dry and raspy, almost used up, spoken through cracked lips, and he reaches out to pat Jean’s leg. His hand looks like it’s made out of bones, desiccated and trembling, and Marco figures that’s fitting, since Jean’s leg feels like leathery skin stretched over a slender femur. Marco closes his eyes and remembers Jean’s legs the way they used to be, lean and muscled and strong, and how he liked to watch Jean run, how Jean had looked like a deer, moving free and graceful, almost hovering above the earth, and he can feel tears prickling behind his eyes again. He cries so easily now, as though he weren’t fighting a constant battle against dehydration, as though his eyes believe tears will make things right again. But Marco knows he is no fairy tale prince, and that if tears were a cure, the world would still be spinning on its axis and he’d open his eyes and Jean would be looking up at him, a smirk on his lips and warmth in his eyes. Marco can see it behind his eyelids, can see Jean smiling at him, can watch his lips slowly part and can hear his voice, echoing behind his eardrums, sweet and dear and loved, loved so damn much, and Marco lifts a hand to his mouth, covering it to keep the sob trapped behind his teeth. 

When he opens his eyes, Jean is the same. Blank. Unresponsive. Grey and cold and motionless, until something catches his attention and makes him squirm a little, listless and dull. 

“Jean…” Marco hates the way it sounds like he’s pleading, hates the weakness in his voice, but he can’t help it. “Jean, please… please, just… just talk to me. Just… anything, okay? Anything…” 

Marco stares at Jean until his vision blurs, until he can’t hold his eyes open any longer, until they burn and pulse in his sockets and he has to close them. Blindly, he reaches out, finding Jean’s waist—once such a lovely, narrow little thing, something Jean had hated and Marco had loved, now skin stretched over bone—and turns Jean over, onto his side. Jean thrashes weakly, resisting the sudden movement, but Marco is still stronger than he is, still barely able to exert control over him. He rolls Jean over and, eyes still closer, lays down behind him, fitting his own skeletal legs behind Jean’s, wrapping an arm around Jean’s nonexistent waist, tucking his face in behind Jean’s shoulder. He breathes in through his nose, shaky and desperate, trying to catch even the faintest hint of Jean’s scent, the tiniest promise of anything beyond rot and decay. 

Nothing. Only the scent of the grave, and Marco presses his face against the back of Jean’s neck and cries and cries, trying uselessly to awaken his lover and call him back to him. He reaches up, with fumbling fingers, and undoes the neck brace, wanting the touch of Jean’s skin, even if it’s dry and cold now, even if it’s nothing like he remembers. 

He’s so intent on getting at Jean’s neck that he barely even feels it when his hand strays too close and Jean’s teeth brush against his skin, splinting a long, bloody scratch with one incisor. 

~*~ 

Marco pads downstairs for the last time. Fever is already running through him, making him hot and shaky, and his right hand is swollen and pulsing, basically useless. He can feel the infection running up his arm, and he thought he’d be more upset about it, but all he feels is a dull, blank disinterest. He’s failed. He tried his best, and it wasn’t good enough, and now this is how it ends. 

He stumbles to the kitchen, his feet feeling distant and far away, and finds the last jug of water. Tucking it under his arm and staggering under its weight, Marco wanders to the library, with its eight books. He selects the newest of the photo albums and flips it open, turning through the pages until he finds the last one, until he finds the studio portrait of his family, beaming and looking polished and elegant, the photo delivered two days before everything went wrong. He examines his family’s faces, and it’s almost like looking at strangers. He presses the picture to his heart and makes his way back upstairs. 

Jean is waiting for him in his bedroom, waiting patiently, unable to do anything but wait, and Marco sits on the bed beside him. The neck brace is off, discarded on the floor, worthless now, but Jean still moves his head as though it’s on, as though the muscles in his neck tightened and mummified in a certain position and he can no longer move it properly. The realization of that violence, that crime committed against Jean makes Marco weep all over again, and he wipes his nose on his wasted arm, leaving behind a bloody smear of mucus. 

The water jug is heavy, almost too heavy, and it takes Marco a few tries to dampen a mostly clean t-shirt, one he found in his brother’s room. He splashes water down his front, wasting it, but it doesn’t matter now. Now he needs the water for one more thing, and then the rest of the jug can sit in this room, can evaporate and leave the house and turn into rain. Maybe it will turn into a cloud and rain down into the lake in Jinae, and Marco likes that thought. He likes the idea of some of his tears turning into rain. 

He carefully cleans off Jean’s face, wiping away the crusted on drool and blood, the accumulated filth. Jean, as though understanding what’s going on, holds still for it, and only tries to bite Marco once, when he strays too close to his mouth. 

“Too late, buddy, you already got me,” Marco croaks, and smiles a little at his gallows humor. He works slowly, patiently, until Jean is as clean as he’s going to get him. Then he opens a little jar on the nightstand, one he’s been saving, and scoops out the last little bit of Jean’s hair cream. Carefully, methodically, he rubs it through Jean’s hair, ignoring the way Jean’s hair separates from his scalp and comes out in Marco’s hand, using the hair cream to recreate the messy bed head that Jean loved so much. It takes him longer than he thought it would, and Marco finally understands why Jean used to take so long in the bathroom. 

With Jean clean and styled, with the last of his cologne sprayed on his chest, a fragrance that stirs up memories and brings fresh tears to Marco’s eyes, Marco turns to himself. He washes his face and runs wet hands through his hair; his hair is long now, past his shoulders, tangled and matted, while Jean’s still looks the same. He changes into a clean shirt, his last clean shirt, one he’d been saving, and it hangs on him like it was made for a much larger man. Marco supposes, in a way, that it was. 

The fever is raging through him now, making the world fade in and out of focus around him, and Marco knows he needs to hurry. He can feel his body dying all around him, can feel things deep inside him shutting down. He’s not afraid. He’s relieved. Now he knows how it ends. Now he can stop fighting. 

He turns Jean over onto his side, facing the wall, and uses a push pin to tack the picture of Marco and his family on the wall above Jean’s shoulder, where Marco will be able to see it. Then he reaches into the nightstand drawer, pulling out something that has rested patiently there, waiting for this day. 

Marco turns on Jean’s cell phone, praying that it will still have some life left inside it after sleeping these many months. The trusty little iPhone, never far from Jean’s hand in a life Marco can barely remember, comes to life with a quiet chirp, and Marco sees that it has 7% battery life left. It’s not much; it’ll be enough. It takes Marco three tries to type in Jean’s passcode with his numb hands—Marco’s own birthday, impossible to forget—and he has a moment of horror when he thinks he might botch it, when he thinks his hands will betray him and fumble the number and the cell phone won’t reveal its secrets. But then it works, and the phone unlocks, showing images of a lost world on its screen. 

Marco goes to the photos, scrolling through until he finds the last one, the one he wants. It was taken a few days before everything went to hell, before the world devoured itself, and he smiles when he finds it, remembering. He had stayed the night with Jean’s family, and Jean and his mother had made omelets together the next morning. It’s a candid shot, a selfie, taken by Marco himself, with he and Jean on either side of Jean’s mother, their arms around her as she holds a platter full of omelets. All of them are beaming at the camera, caught in a moment of simple happiness and joy, something that the world will never know again. 

Marco doesn’t know what happened to Jean’s mother. He doesn’t want to know. 

Tenderly, reverently, Marco sets the phone on the bed, leaning it up against the wall so Jean can see it. Then he slowly removes the belts from Jean’s arms, from his legs, so Jean can get up and walk if he so chooses. After so long without the use of his limbs, Jean lays still, as though he doesn’t understand what’s happening, his eyes staring mindlessly at the picture of himself, at the picture of his life before everything went so very, very wrong. 

He’s fading; Marco can feel the fever spiking, and he knows he’s dying. With his last ounce of strength, he lays down behind Jean and curls behind him, winding one of the belts around their forearms, tying them together. He pushes his fingers between Jean’s, and imagines he feels Jean squeeze his hand back, imagines that Jean is responding at last, that now that he’s about to join him in death, Jean is finally acknowledging him and will be there to greet him. 

It’s not so scary, dying, when you know someone is waiting for you on the other side. 

Marco rests his head on the pillow next to Jean’s, breathes in deep, and kisses the back of Jean’s neck. As his vision fades, he looks up, at the picture of himself and his family, and squeezes Jean’s hand one last time. 

“Goodnight, Jean. I love you…” 


End file.
